The cost of poor quality in health care ranges from 30 to 60 cents of every health care dollar. Until recently, however, there have been few financial consequences for health care providers’ failure to address the underlying root causes. This article describes Medicare’s new policy of not paying for preventable medical errors and complications, and how this may drive implementation of quality management systems in health care.

Quality management systems (QMS) and health care
As long ago as 2001, the Automotive Industry Action Group cited the possible role of ISO 9001 in reducing medical costs while saving thousands of lives. There’s little doubt that ISO-compliant systems would have prevented the following medical errors.

In 2002, a cancer patient received a tenfold overdose of the blood thinner Warfarin, which resulted in an eventually fatal cerebral hemorrhage. A common term for this is “death by decimal,” which involves a patient getting 10 times or one tenth what the doctor prescribed. We’re more careful with our money than we are with medications, because we write out the dollar amount on checks to prevent exactly this kind of error.

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